It occurred to me recently that, in the Animal Kingdom, games evolve before “art” does. After all, those of us with pets see our puppies and kitties play games of their own devising every day. Evolutionarily speaking, games are controlled, safe scenarios that symbolically represent some advantageous activity. Animals derive pleasure from these practice activities as a biological function that leads to survival. The fun of games is instinctual.

But we are more advanced than juvenile lionesses play-hunting each other, and when we play, we often ascribe abstract meaning to the mechanical constructs of our games. Birds may sing, but no bird could name their song, “The Four Seasons.”

Thinking about it in this way makes the whole “are games art?” argument seem silly. Art, of course, is the creation and interpretation of symbols. These symbols are myriad, encompassing limitless forms. Nothing else must really be said.

]]>http://www.cwknight.com/?feed=rss2&p=4011Wind Up Knighthttp://www.cwknight.com/?p=399
http://www.cwknight.com/?p=399#respondSat, 17 Dec 2011 09:08:51 +0000http://www.cwknight.com/2011/12/17/wind-up-knight/My latest addicting phone game recommendation is a cute little “runner” style game called Wind Up Knight. It has a few more mechanics than most games I’ve played of this type, and the graphics are really fun!

]]>http://www.cwknight.com/?feed=rss2&p=3990Some programming things I’ve been looking athttp://www.cwknight.com/?p=343
http://www.cwknight.com/?p=343#commentsFri, 09 Dec 2011 04:11:11 +0000http://www.cwknight.com/?p=343Did you know that if you are interested in learning how to program Windows Phone applications, Microsoft has provided all of the tools and resources needed, for free, on their web site?

I’ve also found a good free ebook that has greatly enhanced my understanding of the programming language C#, which is what many Windows phone applications are written in. It is called .Net Book Zero and it is available at http://www.charlespetzold.com/dotnet/ . I put this book on my Nook and read about 150 pages of it today, and I liked it a lot.

Just figured some of you might like to learn some of this stuff too, so I thought I’d share.

]]>http://www.cwknight.com/?feed=rss2&p=3431I Literally Cannot Title This Anything Save “Some Japanese Game”http://www.cwknight.com/?p=379
http://www.cwknight.com/?p=379#commentsTue, 21 Dec 2010 17:13:57 +0000http://www.cwknight.com/?p=379I can’t quote publications, but I’ve heard that Seattle is 12 times more culturally influential, per capita, than New York or Los Angeles. This is exactly the sort of self-aggrandizing comment that Seattlites love, and you can almost feel the populace rolling this idea around in their heads like a lozenge in their mouths.

It’s really kind of egotistical and gross.

But there are some advantages to living in the cliquey yet trendsetting Pacific Northwest. First, it’s very easy to wear stylish clothes, since everyone will be copying you in a half year, and second, we’re used as a test-market for a lot of really cool stuff that we might not otherwise get to see. Ryan and I wandered into Gameworks Thursday evening, and we found an intriguing new arcade game that was pretty clearly being test marketed. Its large size, necessitated by its four networked game machines and a central instruction/spectating kiosk, forced it into an out of the way corner of the arcade, a fact which afforded us plenty of time to study its mysteries.

Unfortunately, one enigma we were unable to solve was its name, which was either written in Japanese or else in a font indistinguishable from same. In any case, we couldn’t read it, and apparently neither could the Gameworks staff, as a small, office printed sign proclaimed that one had to buy a starter pack in order to enjoy “…this exciting new game…”

This is a giant chart detailing all of the cards. Do you want to have to learn this bullshit?

I feel like I’m getting ahead of myself by mentioning the starter pack, so allow me to explain. The reason we were so drawn to this game was its obviously unique interface. Instead of a joystick and buttons, each cabinet had a broad, flat surface at table height situated in front of the screen. Small graphics of cards decorated the cabinet, and a quick glance at the game’s attract mode confirmed our suspicions. The table was electrically sensitive, and you played the game by moving cards about the surface. It was a combination card game and video game! Awesome!

But here’s the rub- card games take a lot of time to explain and figure out. Remember the first time you learned (or tried to learn…) Magic: The Gathering? Well, imagine trying to figure out Magic while the electrically pulsing bass waves of the arcade’s soundtrack beat against your skull. Once Ryan and I realized the time and money investment required, we immediately lost interest and wandered away in search of Ms. Pac Man.

And besides, do you really want to be the sort of person who not only plays a nerdy trading card game, but plays one that can only be played at fucking Gameworks?

So, I don’t feel it’s necessary to say too much about Tron: Legacy. It’s beautiful, mellow, and contemplative. The original Tron, if you will remember, was not an action movie. Neither is Tron: Legacy.

But it’s gorgeous, and it’s interesting enough, though the script (admittedly better here than in the original) could use a little more… pizazz. They have the seeds of some interesting ideas carried through from the original, including the exploration of the intersection between religion and technology. But these seeds barely sprout, or the code doesn’t branch, or something.

I get the feeling that given some time, the mythos of Tron is going to flesh itself out with fan speculation. Perhaps I’ll find some line of fanboy logic that satisfies my desire to chew on the Tron universe better than Tron: Legacy itself does.

I’ve recently started taking the New York Times Crossword Puzzle seriously.

It’s easy to see why people are intimidated by it- the grid can be daunting, a black-and-white menace more reminiscent of the chaotically symmetrical face of an industrial drill bit than a Sunday Breakfast diversion. But with just a small bit of training and a little practice, a wonderfully witty and challenging world unfolds from this mess of clues and letters.

My journey began over coffee, when my friend Eli took the crossword he was working on and scribbled this code above the puzzle:

M – 1

T – 2

W – 3

H – 4

F – 5

S – 6

U – 4

After an inquiry and the admission that I had never completed a full puzzle, Eli elucidated the chart, explaining that it was a difficulty scale for the New York Times Crossword, corresponding to the day of the week. He went on to explain that there are standardized clue conventions, some of which include:

clues with abbreviations in them have abbreviated answers

clues that are punctuated with a question mark are always puns

the long answers are usually related by a common theme

answers must agree with the clue in terms of tense and part of speech

clues repeat all the time!

I was encouraged by this new information, and not too long after Eli’s tutorial, I bought a collection of 50 New York Times Monday puzzles. As I tore through them (Monday, it turns out, really IS easy) I found my mind quickly adapting itself to the abstract thinking crosswords encourage. The educational component is huge- I could feel myself beginning to see more connections between concepts, and every puzzle is chock full of interesting things to think about. And like nearly every clever thing made by clever people, there’s plenty of humor involved, as well. Answers to clues are often deliciously witty, and once I even encountered a puzzle with two clues that, when solved, made me laugh out loud. They were: “a Yogi Berra quote” and “a Yogi Berra quote”. This isn’t uncommon, as puzzles often have two identical clues, but they typically have different answers. Not this time.

With talk that includes comparisons to James Cameron’s Avatar, Disney’s Tron Legacy is getting some incredible hype as it leads up to its release next week. Leading the surge of Tron preview media content was the release of the original score, created by French-electronica-legends Daft Punk.

I’ve been listening to it a bunch since its release, and I have to to say that it’s top notch. I was surprised by the traditional orchestral elements, but Daft Punk definitely showed off their compositional chops, delivering a score that has the subtle emotion necessary for a film, and a dance beat oscilloscopic enough to satisfy anybody’s head bopping needs. The track “End of Line” is particularly good at tapping into the shared cultural rhythms of the techno-lifestyle, and I can’t help but think that its constituent parts are the sounds of some far future interface, remixed for the here-and-now.

“Arena” does something similar, mixing a futuristic dial-tone with the pulsing beat of a shamanistic drum. The intersection of tech and tribe is reminiscent of the ever present fact that /humans/ are at the other end of our connections. It’s an important reminder that at its core, the Internet is just another update to banging on a drum.

All in all, the soundtrack has made me even more excited to see the movie. If the film can match the pace of the music, we are in for an epic ride indeed.

More specifically, my friend Eli Juicy Jones (Eli’s Blog) and I have been talking and thinking about the future of mobile devices.

Not too long ago, I was tapping a Facebook message into my iphone when I realized that it had been three days since I had last used my desktop computer. I was surprised by how capable my little digital Swiss Army Knife had become, despite (or perhaps, because of?) having seen its feature set grow through software updates and third party apps.

(It was around this time that I hypothesized to Eli that Apple would introduce an App Store for desktop computing, and that this would be the first step in a convergence of Apple’s iOS and Mac OS X. The results of my long term prognostication obviously remain to be seen, but it is worth mentioning that the App Store now has a quiet, unassuming place on my MacBook’s Application Dock.)

It seems from their dominance that our interfaces for our smart phones are solved. Even Android- a platform somewhat infamous for it’s lackluster polish and unifying design vision- has been making incredible strides in usability. With the advent of large scale tablet devices (like Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab) one would think that we could simply port over the lessons we learned on phones and have excellent devices, ready to deliver us the trinkets of our Digital Lifestyle right out of the gate. Apple and Samsung both seem to have taken this idea to heart, as using either device has the distinct feeling of using a blown up iOS or Android phone.

Which, I suppose, is fine. Logic would dictate that one could then get at /least/ as much utility out of an iPad as out of an iPhone, and we’ve already shown that that’s good enough to make even desktops look clunky. But is an interface designed for small, data-dense screens really suitable for something larger? It’s obvious when one uses an app designed with the big screen in mind; it’s beautiful, simple, elegant, and intuitive. Shouldn’t it all be like that? Shouldn’t things be /better/ than on our phones?

Part of the issue is that we didn’t exactly build our interfaces to scale. Moving little square buttons around a grid is fine when you’re on a small screen with a few apps, but it becomes unmanageable as space increases. What if someone figured out how to make an interface that could clearly scale? What if someone just had to make an app once, and it would fit on everything from phone to tablet to TV? The hardware is here to make our electronic lives genuinely comfortable. Why hasn’t the software caught up?

Fortunately, there are people working on it. The new Windows Phone 7 interface is magical, and it is my hope that it is shamelessly ripped off by every other manufacturer. Its “Metro” GUI, which begins with the radical assumption that a program’s interface can exist outside the viewable bounds of the screen, does such a wonderful job exposing information to the user that it seems like clicking is barely required. Buttons expand to fill areas, using their newfound surface area to display information quickly and subtly. Often, opening an app isn’t even required, as everything you need to know just flips into place on it’s button, like a mini-airport arrival board. Inside apps, functionality is segmented in tabs whose size is irrelevant. The screen slides about like a viewfinder over a larger interface, an effect that makes it seem like WP7 is destined for tablets. In fact, the basic features of it’s design have already proven themselves on large format screens, in the form of the current Xbox 360 dashboard. It might be the future, and odds are you’ve already used it.

One day, tablet devices will be ready to be the dominant form or computing for most users. Unfortunately, we aren’t quite there yet, though we should have high hopes for the second generation of the technology.

Our awesome smart phones will keep us company in the meantime.

]]>http://www.cwknight.com/?feed=rss2&p=3101Things I Am Fascinated With #1http://www.cwknight.com/?p=300
http://www.cwknight.com/?p=300#respondThu, 29 Jul 2010 16:00:01 +0000http://www.cwknight.com/?p=300Hallway-Long History Exhibitions That Do Not Reside In Museums or Other Such Buildings of Record, Except Possibly Libraries, Depending On How Large and Museum-Like the Library Is.

Prospectors buying supplies in Seattle

The other day, I found myself utterly captivated by a long pictorial exhibition of Seattle during the Klondike Gold Rush. As I wandered down the long hallway upon whose walls these sepia toned memories hung, I realized the great incongruity of my experiences with these pieces and the experiences of the hurried businesspeople who walked the halls alongside me. As their shoes and rolling laptop cases CLICK-CLACKED down the subterranean tunnel between the Hilton and the conference center, I heard instead the sounds of the Seattle train yards of the 19th century. They were rushing to meetings; I was mentally running my fingers over the leather and wood seat of a merchant’s stagecoach. And while they chattered into their cell phones, it was all I could do to keep my teeth from chattering, so real was the icy chill of Chilkoot Pass to my imagination.

Chilkoot Pass

In the hour or so I spent poring over these images, no one else so much as slowed their pace to look. It made me wonder– had I ever seen anyone else read the information cards next to the Native American vases in the cases at the San Francisco Airport? Had I ever seen anyone else read the placards next to the collection of Art Deco radios in the lobby of that hotel I stayed at one time? Was I the only one who ever stopped in lobbies and hallways and accent alcoves to read and to examine and to learn the things that other people thought were important enough to put on display?

I could think of only one other person who I had ever seen attack the world’s free and public knowledge the way that I did: my father. I imagined that he had gathered these photographs, written the descriptions, and hung them on the wall in that perfect, flawless way that he does everything, right there underneath downtown Seattle, just for me to find.

And in a way, he did. If he hadn’t shown me how to be interested in everything, how to learn, how to explore, I never would have stopped, never even noticed that the CLICK-CLACK of my shoes was reverberating off of any history at all.